Night Shift (13 page)

“Do the nurses know what Mamie is trying to do?”

Tommy shook his head. “They just know Mamie’s getting worse. They’re talking about tying her to the bed.”

Manfred recoiled, imagining ropes or handcuffs.

Tommy noticed. “Naw, you idiot, they use these soft restraints. But we hate to see that happen to Mamie. When she gets back to being okay it’ll embarrass her something awful.”

“So what do you want me to do?” Manfred felt totally at a loss.

“Do some mojo on her. Make her quit thinking about this.”

“I need to send for Fiji. She’s better at that kind of stuff. I’m just a two-bitpsychic.”

“Well, Mr. Two-Bit, you get in there and try.” Tommy got up slowly, stiffly. He and Manfred made their way to the room next door, Mamie and Suzie’s room.

The two women were dressed and sitting in matching armchairs identical to those in Tommy’s room, and the television was turned to a game show. Mamie’s curly white hair was flattened on one side, which would have mortified her if she’d been aware of it. Suzie, whose parents had immigrated to the States from Hong Kong, was carefully combed and made up, as usual. But she looked as exhausted as Tommy.

“I like the hair, Suzie,” Manfred said, when she turned to the door. In the weeks since he’d seen her, Suzie had dyed her steel-gray hair its original black.

“Thank you,” she said. “And how are you and that pretty Estella?”

“Hey, we traded phone numbers,” he said, not at all surprised that Suzie had picked up on his admiration for the nurse’s aide.

“That’s good,” she said. “Now, let’s see if you can help Mamie, here.”

At the sound of her name, Mamie opened her pale blue eyes. She turned slowly and painfully to look at Manfred.

“Hey, honey,” she said, her voice wispy. “I didn’t hear you come in. Hey, Manfred, give me a ride back to Midnight? I need to . . . do something there.” She looked sly.

“No, Mamie,” he said. He sat on the bed closest to her and reached over to hold her thin hand. “I can’t do that. It’s not healthy for you there right now.”

“I don’t have anything to live for,” she said, tears running down the fine pale skin of her cheeks. “I’ll just go there, to the roads, where they cross, and I can put an end to this.”

“Miss Mamie, what would Tommy and Suzie do without you?”

She smiled faintly. “Oh, they’d manage, same as always. Come on, Manfred, put me in that car of yours and let me go home with you.”

He had seldom felt more at a loss.

“I can’t. There’s stuff going on in Midnight that’s bad. We have to clear it up before you come back for a visit.”

Mamie said, “All right.” She’d suddenly lost the thread of the conversation. She glanced over at Tommy. “Tommy? Is it time for lunch yet?”

“Not yet,” he said. “In an hour, honey.” But Mamie had already focused her attention on the television screen, though from her blank expression she wasn’t really engaged with what she was seeing.

Manfred tried again to think of a way he could help his friends. And he came up with nothing.

He said as much to Suzie and Tommy. “All I can do,” he said, “is ask Fiji if she’s got any ideas. And try to solve this problem in Midnight as soon as possible.”

“People just show up and . . .
blam!?
” Suzie shook her head.

“That’s how it’s happened,” Manfred said. “No motive, no warning.”

“Mamie never was too big on Fiji, but I don’t think she’d care anymore, long as she gets better,” Suzie said wearily.

“All right, buddy-boy,” Tommy said. “You run back to Midnight and you fix things up with Fiji. Mamie shouldn’t be suffering like this.”

Manfred signed out in the lobby, only vaguely conscious of the curious look the volunteer was giving him at his quick departure without his friends, whom he often took on an outing.

Manfred walked slowly to his car. The temperature was only in the low eighties, but he was too preoccupied to enjoy the relief from the summer’s heat. He’d never had such a jarring visit at Safe Harbor. He found himself dismayed and worried to a degree that surprised him. Until this moment, Manfred hadn’t realized how much he’d come to rely on his visits with Tommy, Mamie, and Suzie. He missed his grandmother; their conversation had somehow eased the loss for him, but he hadn’t even understood that.
Some psychic I am,
he thought.

As he started his car, planning to drive right back to Midnight and talk to Fiji, Manfred found himself—nonetheless!—excited at the prospect of calling Stell. He wondered how long he had to wait until he punched in her number. “I must be really shallow,” he muttered, and he drove back to Midnight thinking of a jumble of things, both happy and sad.

Fiji had customers, so Manfred waited until they’d left before walking over to The Inquiring Mind. He found his friend sitting in one of the wicker armchairs, and she was definitely in a serious mood.

“What?” she said, as he sank into the chair opposite her. She turned her face to his abruptly, as if she’d been interrupted in a conversation with someone else.

“Maybe I should come back tomorrow?”

“No,” she said wearily. “That’s okay. Let me guess. There’s some problem I have to help solve.”

“Ahhhh—yeah.”

“Gee, I’m surprised.”

Manfred had never heard Fiji fall back on sarcasm. “You don’t seem to be in the mood to put yourself out,” he said. “Is there something I can do to help you?”

For a terrible moment, he thought she was going to cry. To his profound relief, the moment passed. Fiji kind of shook herself and then forced a smile onto her face. “So, what is it?” she said.

He explained about Mamie, leaving any mention of Stell out of the story, though he was in the mood to drag her into every conversation.

“So you want me to drive up to Davy and cast some kind of spell on poor old Mamie so she doesn’t want to walk to Midnight to commit suicide,” Fiji said. “And you want me to do this without anyone at the assisted-living place being any the wiser.” She rubbed her face with her hands.

Manfred hadn’t really thought about the difficulty of his request. “Yes,” he said. “That’s about the size of it. I’m sorry, Fiji, I probably wouldn’t even have brought it up if Tommy hadn’t been so positive one of us could do something about it. He thought I could, but I can’t think of any way a psychic could change Mamie’s mind when this awful thing, this impulse, is hijacking her.”

“So that’s what you think is happening?” Fiji seemed to be considering the idea. “Maybe you’re right, Manfred. Did you ever watch
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
?”

The change of subject left him teetering. “Ah . . . sure. My grandmother loved it.”

“Do you ever wonder if Midnight’s on the Hellmouth? Like Sunnydale?”

Manfred laughed. “That’s exactly what it feels like,” he said. “You must be Willow, and Olivia must be Buffy. And Lemuel is Angel.”

That brought a smile to Fiji’s face, too. “I would classify Olivia more as Faith,” she said. “Bobo can be Xander.”

“So Diederik would be Oz.”

For a reason Manfred couldn’t fathom, Fiji flushed.

“As long as we’re having a neighborly chat,” Manfred continued when she didn’t speak, “I’m thinking something’s wrong with the Reeds.”

She looked at him doubtfully. “You mean, they’re sick or worried or something?”

“Nope. I mean, there’s something really hinky about them. Lemuel and Olivia think so, too.”

“Oh, I agree. Even with the economic slump, them settling here is strange. But I’m just so glad they’re here. He can fix everything, just about, and getting a repairman to drive out to Midnight is not easy. And she’s such a great cook. Besides, it’s nice to have a real kid around.”

Though Manfred didn’t think much about Grady one way or another, he nodded. He didn’t want to seem anti-baby. “This is the equivalent of Tommy not wanting to question the good luck that put him in Safe Harbor,” Manfred said. “Lemuel wonders about the Reeds, too.”

“Lemuel? Then I’m glad I’m not Madonna or Teacher,” Fiji said. She stood up. “You want me to go to the nursing home this afternoon?”

“Assisted-living center,” he corrected. “They’re in the assisted wing, not the nursing home wing. And the sooner, the better. I’m sorry. I’m imposing.” Though she hadn’t said a word, he could tell from the way her mouth turned that she was reluctant.

She shrugged. “I’ll go tomorrow. Business is slow anyway.” Fiji looked tired and dispirited.

“Listen, I’ll keep your shop open.” Suddenly, Manfred realized this was the least he could do. He tried to suppress the thought that he would miss a lot of business that way, and it was probable that Fiji would not have a single customer.

She brightened. “That would be great. I don’t think Diederik’s quite up to that yet, and he’s the closest we’ve got to a free person. Teacher is measuring down at the Antique Gallery and Nail Salon, to see if he can build some internal stairs. Chuy and Joe are tired of going outside every time they go to and from the shop. And you could bring your laptop, right? Maybe you could kind of keep up with your work that way.”

Manfred brightened. “We’ll do a favor exchange, right?”

“Okay,” she said.

Manfred thought they both felt better, and he hoped Fiji could do Mamie some good.

L
emuel loved the fall and winter, especially after the time change. Through the years, people—including, most recently, Olivia— had tried to explain to Lemuel how a government could decide what time it was.

“I still think it’s arrogant,” he’d told Olivia. “But since I’m up while people are still awake, I like it.”

“I thought you didn’t like company,” she’d said, smiling.

“I like to talk to people. I like to be with you. I like more customers during the night.”

This was all true. Unfortunately, night customers were sometimes human, and often drunk and therefore tedious, but at least he could take some energy from them.

He was talking to a monk at the moment.

“You haven’t been hearing the giant voice?” the man in the robe asked.

“I haven’t,” Lemuel said. He did not know if the man was mad, or if there really was a giant voice. “What does it tell you to do?” Lemuel said.

“It told me to come here to kill myself, that as a man of God my death would be especially sweet, but I know that is a mortal sin,” said the self-proclaimed monk. “So I have told it to get behind me, and I decided instead I’d pawn this silver fork.”

It was a meat-serving fork, not a dinner fork, and it was very old. Since it was silver, Lemuel handled it wearing a glove. “Yes,” he said, turning it over to look at the maker’s mark, “why would a monk need a meat fork?” The front door opened, and Lemuel glanced up to see Fiji come in.

Lemuel made short work of the transaction with the monk so the man would go on his way. Fiji looked troubled, but not only that—she was exhausted.

“A real monk?” she asked, as the door shut behind the visitor.

“I don’t know. He wears a robe and lives by himself somewhere south of here, and he walked in. I am not sure how to designate him. A real monk or a false one?”

“A Catholic one?”

“He wore a crucifix. Beyond that, I couldn’t say.”

“Lemuel, I hear a voice.”

Lemuel stayed silent, because he had several different reactions. He was surprised, when he’d thought he couldn’t be surprised ever again, that Fiji had picked him to confide in. He was dismayed, because it couldn’t be coincidence that the monk had said the same thing. And he was mighty apprehensive, because this was a very ominous sign.

“You must tell me about this,” he told the witch.

And she did.

Lemuel kept his silence when she was finished. “Fiji, he’s trying to seduce you,” he said at last.

“He’s the only one,” she muttered, but Lemuel chose to ignore that.

“Who do you think it is?” Lemuel asked. He suspected he knew, but he wanted to hear what Fiji believed.

“I think it’s something bad and old, and I think it’s picking on me because, in some way, I threaten it.”

“I think you are absolutely right,” he said. “Sister, you need to leave town for a while.”

“I can’t do that,” Fiji said. “I have to keep the shop open. And I promised Manfred I would go see Mamie tomorrow afternoon. She’s being pulled to the crossroad, Lemuel.”

Lemuel looked into Fiji’s scared brown eyes. “I understand,” he said. “And I’m thinking on this as hard as I can. Don’t despair, friend.”

After she went back to her house, Lemuel left the pawnshop. With his very sharp hearing and sight, he could tell when anyone pulled up in front of the shop, and he could be back in the store almost before they’d gotten out of their vehicles. (The night he’d circled the diner and the trailer had been a case in point.) Now, he went to “visit” the Reeds almost every night, and they were beginning to have bad dreams, even Grady. Madonna and Teacher were getting jumpy and irritable without knowing why.

Lemuel didn’t care.

Lemuel had nothing against Grady, but he was not sentimental about babies. He had been born in a time when early mortality was the norm, and there were no hospitals, no medicine, no doctors for many miles in any direction. Babies routinely did not live to reach adulthood. His own mother had lost three, he knew, though he did not have clear memories of those babies.

When he returned to the pawnshop after his run, after his nightly visitation to the Reeds, Olivia was waiting for him.

“I was thinking about my childhood,” he said by way of greeting.

“Did you have siblings?”

“If you mean sisters and brothers, I was the only surviving son. I had two sisters who lived. Susan Mary died when she was pregnant with her first child at seventeen, and the baby died, too. Hester May died at twenty-seven when she had some infection in her stomach.”

“Appendicitis, maybe?” Olivia asked.

He shrugged. “Maybe. She left two children alive, their names were . . . Luke and Phillip—Webster?” Lemuel dimly recalled Hester’s husband, David, but Lemuel himself had died a year later, so he didn’t know what had happened to David and his sons.

“So it’s possible you have kin through your sister’s children.”

“I suppose,” he said. “Every now and then, I think of tracking them down.”

“Maybe your sister’s descendants are computer programmers or astronauts,” Olivia said. She obviously thought that was funny. “Shouldn’t there be written records somewhere?”

“Back then there weren’t so many,” Lemuel told her, and for a moment the past came alive to him. He remembered how it had been, and he’d told Olivia about how he’d gone to work as soon as he could ride. Lemuel had been a cowhand, working for this rancher and that, whoever could afford to pay him. He had learned to read when he was fourteen, while he was tending cattle for a man named Marvin Middleton, sometime after 1850.

Middleton had been a strange bird, as Lemuel put it when he was telling Olivia about him.

“He was a schoolteacher back east,” Lemuel said. “Then he inherited this spread when Horace Middleton got bit by a rattlesnake. Mr. Middleton was swung to come west by what he called ‘the romance of it all.’ He brought along his wife, Belle, and their daughters, Mabel and Daisy, and they became a ranch family.”

“How did they like it?” Olivia had asked him.

“Not much, on the part of Mrs. Middleton and Daisy. Mabel took to it right smart,” Lemuel said. “One night when we were out with the cattle, Mr. Middleton found I couldn’t read, and he decided to set that right.”

“I would have thought you’d have been too tired to think by nighttime.”

“Dropping in my boots,” Lemuel said. “But he was relentless. Learned a lot of words, too.”

“What happened to them all?”

Lemuel looked back through the decades. “Well, Mr. Middleton got throwed off his horse about the fifth year I worked for him, and he broke his neck. Mrs. Middleton took it pretty hard and headed back east as fast as she could pack and go. Daisy went with her.”

“What about Mabel?”

“She and I were hitched,” Lemuel said. “So we worked the ranch, and I hired someone to help me as I’d helped Mr. Middleton, a man named . . . well, I cannot remember his name. Then a gunslinger named Donald Lee Coe came to town. That name I remember.”

“You had a gunfight,” Olivia had said, her eyes wide. “Like the OK Corral!”

“Those damn Earps,” Lemuel said, shaking his head. “One as bad as another. No, ma’am. I was a good shot, but no gunslinger. I got wounded in the crossfire between Donald Lee Coe and the marshal, Harvey Burns. The town was quite a bit south of here. It was the closest town to our ranch, and it was called Baileyville.”

“Wounded where?” Olivia had a professional interest in wounds.

He pointed to his left side. “Took out a hunk of meat,” he said. “But it was the infection that got me. After a day, I was nigh unto death.”

“Your first death. Who caused your second?”

“My wife, Mabel.”

“You’re kidding!”

“I would never make this up, Olivia.”

“How did she—? How had she changed, herself?”

“While I was lying in town in the back room of the saloon, bleeding all over a table, Mabel had a visitor at the ranch. He’d come from town to tell her about my mishap, you see, and as soon as he told her he had news of me, why of course she invited him in.”

“And he was the same kind of vampire as you are?”

“Yes. Blood or energy. Like a hybrid car,” Lemuel said. It was his favorite joke since he’d learned that such cars existed. “So he bit my wife, and bid her bring me the favor of life, as he put it. She was knocked sideways by the whole experience, since she had never heard a story about such a thing, and it was outside her Christian thinking and her education.”

“I understand,” Olivia said.

“But she felt that God had planned this rescue for me and she must be the one to deliver it, as the Indian had bade her. So into town she comes at night, though she had to wait for the three days to rise again, and then she had to kill the ranch hand to get her some strength. By which time I was as good as dead.”

“And then?”

“And then she told the ‘doctor,’ who was really a quack who pulled teeth and suchlike and had this awful patent medicine that was nothing but alcohol and worse things, to get out of the room, that she wanted to tell me farewell in privacy. Since there was nothing more he could do for me—and he’d already done plenty in the way of drugging me—he left. Mabel had had the foresight to pay for a round of drinks, so we were left alone for quite a time. She related to me what the Indian had done to her. I could scarcely understand it, what with the drugs and the illness and the pain, but I agreed to her proposition. Though it was mighty painful, it wasn’t that much more painful than the gunshot and the infection, and it was over quicker.”

“And then?” Olivia was so wide-eyed she’d looked like an owl.

“And then, she went out into the saloon and told them all that I had died, which was no surprise to anyone. And she told them she would take me back to the ranch to be buried, which was also no surprise, since many people did that. They helped her out by tying me over her horse. The horse, though mighty skittish, got us back to the ranch that night.”

“People didn’t think it was strange she wanted to ride at night?”

“She told them that in the daytime, with the sun, I would be bloated by the time we reached our place.”

Olivia nodded. “So, when you got back to the ranch . . . ?”

“She buried me, as she had to. There was no ranch hand to help her! And when I came out of the ground she was waiting. One of the men in the bar had ridden out to see how she was faring, and perhaps to see if he could console a grieving widow. She had kept him alive for me.”

“But what happened to Mabel after that? What did you do during the Civil War?” Olivia asked.

“Enough history for tonight,” Lemuel replied.

She wondered if she’d been insensitive, asking questions about events so long past. “Does it hurt to remember?”

He thought about that. “Not exactly. But it’s not comfortable, either. And I don’t always remember clearly.” He shrugged. “It’s been a long time.”

Now, as Lemuel pored over books, he was grateful to Mr. Middleton for teaching him to read. Even Mr. Middleton could not have imagined that the man he’d known as Bart Polson would be able to read an ancient language. In truth, Lemuel’s progress was tedious and slow. He was always aware that time was ticking away at the crossroads. He felt it, like a heavy hand on his shoulder, resting heavier and heavier as the nights passed.

Slowly, he translated a sentence out loud. “And when he rises, he will have help by powerful creatures, because he can talk to them while he is still confined. To others, he is silent.” Lemuel thought that over. It seemed ominous, and he began to worry even more whether Midnight could survive the crisis that was surely coming. He bent back over the book, hoping to find another passage that would explain this cryptic sentence, which was in the middle of a paragraph he couldn’t crack.

After an hour of hard work on the text, with no further results, Lemuel was so tired that he left the pawnshop for three hours straight. He hunted. He ran through the scrubby bushes and cacti, he leaped over rocks, unseen and ecstatically himself. He found four passed-out teens camping out to the north by the Río Roca Fría. He took blood from them but left them alive.

Lemuel felt much better after that. Energy was good, reviving; but sometimes, he just needed the blood. He would have enjoyed killing the teenagers, because the energy of the passing was an incredible rush. However, these kids were so well nourished and glossy that he knew they would be missed.